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I wonder if it has write caching, and I wonder if the 750 will finally get that promised firmware update with it. How big is the flash on the 1TB laptop drive, still 8GB? Where does the performance increase come from apart from aerial density then? And is the spindle speed still 7200rpm, since they were going to stop making 7200 drives? Reply

What's the point of making the drive slower than the old Momentus? I know they were abandoning 7200 RPM, but for their performance drive, that makes no sense.POSSIBLY if they added more NAND, but it's exactly the same amount as the 2nd generation Momentus XT.

Also, anyone keeping score here notices that these drives are using MLC NAND, and the previous 2 generation Momentus XT were using SLC NAND.

Yup, that's right, these are using no more NAND, and vastly cheaper NAND, and slower speed spindles.

They seem to have a lower price than the 7200RPM Momentus XT, but otherwise all the points you make are perfectly valid: slower HDD (at least in terms of access times) and lower endurance NAND.

My 2 cents: these will show up (maybe) in cheap laptops to make them feel "just as snappy" as the more expensive ones. Otherwise a 64GB mSATA + any HDD is a faster solution and not much more expensive.Reply

So the SLC in the old ones would actually be even better for write caching? In that case I really do hope they update the firmware with that new functionality on the old ones, there seems to be no reason not to then other than greed. Reply

It would seem more logical that if they were to activate write caching on any SSHD, it would be on the SLC based. However the controller must support it too, which it may or it may not on the old XTs (afaik). On the newer 5400RPM disks you may find a very good controller that would do better wear leveling than the XT's; although the SLC has an inherent advantage, that can be crippled by controller+firmware; the same way MLC/TLC can age pretty well as seen in Samsung's 840 series.

I'm really not hopeful that they'd enable write caching on older XTs for many reasons: why bother if they can't monetize, no tradition in good enthusiast products and support, they're sailing on a nickel and dime market and last but not least if they'd make the old XT looking too good the new one would look even worse.

That said I'd like that old disk updated as it had a lot of potential. For the new ones I think 32GB + 5400RPM 500GB is ideal under 100$.Reply

No reason other than greed? Dude, you need to rethink that word. This is a company whose purpose is to make money. There's not much business sense to upgrade old hardware with better features if you're not selling that hardware anymore. Sure, you want to keep them stable, but why spend extra cash to improve a product that is no longer on sale? That is not in the best interest of the company. That's not greed, that's business. The less money a company makes, the less people it can hire and the less products it can develop. Welcome to the real world.Reply

These are much cheaper though. The Momentus never gained much traction because it was too expensive to serve as a mass market substitute for magnetic drives. Seagates current 500gb/1tb laptop drives are priced at $60/95 on newegg vs $130 for the old 500GB Momentus; a $20/5 price premium is a lot easier to swallow than a $70 one. At that price you might as well get a 32/64GB cache SDD and a standard HD instead.Reply

Looks like the race to the bottom has claimed another fine product. I wonder how this will impact sales? Anyone savvy enough to buy a SSHD in the first place is probably going to be checking technical specifications.Reply

Oh grow up. These drives are VASTLY cheaper than their Momentus XT predecessors.You may not like their specs, and I don't either, but pretending they are "poorly designed" is just stupid. Seagate know their market better than you do, and I suspect these drives will sell in far higher volumes than Momentus XT ever did.

If you're going to criticize something, criticize the things that appear foolish, even within the business context. Playing games about "some writes will be cached --- but we won't tell you which ones" is ridiculous --- it makes them look like they plan to sell vaporware ("buy our crappy firmware today but we promise it will be updated soon" "how soon?" "well, in about the same amount of time it takes to update the average Android phone...").

And I don't see what strange market segmentation games they think they are playing by keeping a cache off their 3 and 4TB drives. Yes, you could argue that those drives are primarily purchased as large streaming storage for movies and music, and 8GB is small. But 8GB would hold the indexes for the drives --- for the Mac the various HFS+ data structures and Spotlight indices, for Windows the equivalents --- and would still make them feel more responsive in every day use.The message Seagate SHOULD be sending is "hybrid drives are the future and we are going all in to do them well"; the message they are actually sending is "we don't know WTF we are doing, but please buy these things if you're buying low-end".Reply

Yep, these look worse. I mean if you're looking for a 5400RPM drive, then okay, but the second gen Momentus XT uses SLC, probably has 4x the RAM cache, and of course the drive itself is slower.

I have to say I'd rather have a normal 7200RPM drive than a hybrid 5400RPM drive. I suppose from their perspective they're hoping to reduce devices they have to design and build, but I don't want to go back to 5400RPM...Reply

$149 for a 2TB drive with 8GB of flash cache? That's a gyp. I can get a 2TB Seagate drive for $90 and a 32GB SSD for $40-50 and have 4 times the cache. Granted, this would be workable on more systems than the separate drive setup, but those other systems wouldn't even be available with an expensive drive like this. They need at least 32GB of flash cache at that price point. Reply

It must bother HDD makers that their regular spinny drives can last for years and years. This way, once the NAND wears out the drive will 'fail' and you'll have to get a new one. Brilliantly nefarious plan, Seagate!Reply

On the last drives the drive would just segment off the worn out NAND and continue to function as a regular hard drive if absolutely none was less. The spinning disk would likely die before that happened though. Reply

Watch out, your ignorance is showing. The NAND, MLC or no, is likely to outlast the mechanical portion of the drive. Even if the NAND does fail, the drive is able to continue working without it (without the benefit of NAND caching, obviously).Reply

Except for the fact that 1TB SSDs will probably hit $300 early next year, at which point that raptor would become absolutely useless.

As it is, you can already go and pair the current 1TB raptor with a 64GB cache-SSD by yourself for around $300, but that same money also buys you a good 500GB SSD. Who needs more than 500GB desperately but is happy with 1TB? And do you really expect WD to develop a special drive for this tiny group of customers?Reply

Even the 1st-gen XTs with only 4GB were a huge improvement over standard HDDs is everyday usage. You can do a lot with even just 4GB-8GB with good firmware and caching algorithms. You can easily fit the file index and boot sectors in that, along with some commonly accessed blocks of system files and application data.

Devices with more NAND would be great, and are certainly incoming. However, calling these a "joke" due to the small amount of NAND is just ignorant. Frankly, with these price points, I can't see any reason to get any other HDD unless performance just isn't a consideration.Reply

The Apple Fusion "drives" are two physical devices, aren't they? I know people where talking about building their own Fusion setups by popping a SSD into a HDD only Mac. OSX saw that there was a SSD and HDD, marked it as a malfunctioning Fusion setup, and then offered to "rebuild" the array/cache/whatever.Reply

Well, Apple charges $250 to upgrade a 1 TB HDD to a 1 TB Fusion - I don't think that Seagate has that as a target market. Also, I think people are misjudging their use of HDD space. For 99% of users, 128 GB or data is way way way more than enough to cache the IO intensive random read program data and is well into caching media files which don't really benefit from the flash storage. People in this thread have both complained about the cost of the drive relative to the 7200 RPM standard drives and the size of the cache, so I think the compromise is about right.

Don't underestimate small amounts of Flash. Look how big 8 GB of RAM feels. Don't look at the size of your HDD and the size of your folder, 80% of your windows folder is fonts, unused drivers and the hybernate file - they don't need to be cached. I'm using a 32 GB flash cache and it feels plenty fast for windows boot and 90% of programs.Reply

While 4 or 8GB is not much, I can tell you that even 4GB is a noticeable step up from just a 7,200rpm HDD. Start up and frequently used programs are much quicker to start up; the whole point of them.

Still, a 2.5" SSD and a 2.5" HDD, or a mSATA SSD and 2.5" HDD are better options, as you can fit the whole OS and frequently used programs (the whole program as well, not just the start up part) on them. They are more expensive though and; the former can mean you have to sacrifice a second battery/ODD/weight saver and the latter often a 3G/4G/UTMS modem.Reply

I think they are still vastly overpriced, as 128G SSDs now cost LESS THAN $100. And more and more laptops nowadays has mSATA slot too (except for apple :]) so I don't see any reason to get hybrid HDD at all. Reply

I'd wait for some benchmarks, but I can see buying these for the laptops I have, if they get a reasonable performance increase for normal use. Not that I really use my laptop (tablet fulfills my needs), but my wife's could use this.Reply

In case anyone's looking to buy-the second gen Momentus XT has a 7200RPM 750GB drive, 32MB RAM cache, and 8GB SLC. This has 5400RPM, presumably 8MB RAM, and 8GB MLC. Every spec is worse, save for the extra 250GB.Reply

If Seagate has ANY sense, it would build a multi-port sata chip in the disk and has an msata connector (space for it, there is enough space on the metal parts of a 3.5 inch disk) so one can plug any of your own Msata drives into the HDD. Then run with it from a single sata port!.The beauty of this design is on a Mac, it can become a Fusion drive right away!. PC based users can use their own caching software or just (JOBD) install an OS on the msata and use the HDD as data drive. On recent Intel board SRT the thing .... (8G of MLC these days!, ha!.).Reply

The best way is to get a WD Raptor drive and a Sandisk 30g cache drive.I love the setup and got the Raptor for half price at Newegg when they were on sale. I found out after reading a lot of reviews that the Sandisk cache drive has the best software. This setup is fast and have had no problems with it.Reply